If you’ve heard of Bartender Bob Bozic, then you’ve heard the stories.

A 65-year-old former boxer who had been a bartender at the Fanelli Cafe in SoHo since 1990, Mr. Bozic cultivated a following as a rude barman who reads several books a week, keeps season tickets to the opera and tells stories of an improbably novelistic life: He fought Larry Holmes at Madison Square Garden; he tried to rob a bank to pay overdue rent; he married Barack Obama’s former girlfriend. It goes on.

Fanelli’s, as everyone calls it, opened on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets in 1922. By the late 1970s it had become a gathering place for artists and bohemians. Now it is crowded with shoppers and tourists. Its hanging red neon sign makes it stand out like a lighthouse when SoHo’s shops close at night, which was when regulars would return to see Mr. Bozic, who refused to make cocktails that required effort, hit on people’s girlfriends and poured free drinks for those who answered his trivia questions. “Fanelli’s is what people expect a bar in New York to be like,” Mr. Bozic said, “and I’m what they expect a bartender to be like.”

Fanelli’s may have endured SoHo’s gentrification, but it remains to be seen how it will endure without Mr. Bozic, who worked his final shift Sunday night two weeks ago. Bar-stool soliloquies about the end of an era were common at his farewell party.

“This place will not be Fanelli’s without Bob,” said Linda Lou, 63. “I won’t come back.”

“Fanelli’s is Bob,” said Jason Solarek, 40.

Mr. Bozic usually wore a ragged T-shirt to work, but he opted for a white shirt with a red tie that evening. Customers speculated aloud whether it was a clip-on.

“For old times’ sake,” he yelled at one point, silencing the room, “everybody can light one cigarette!”

The bar’s owner, Sasha Noe, instantly intervened.

Mr. Bozic called for silence again later to take a theatrical swig of beer before turning to his boss. “I’ve waited years to say this,” he began, and then uttered something unprintable to much applause.

Mr. Bozic halted his performance at one point to make a speech about why, precisely, he was leaving his longtime gig at a New York institution. His hulking hands wiped away tears as he sat on the bar. He was flying to Serbia the next afternoon to reclaim the 22-room mansion in Belgrade that Communists seized from his family in 1946.

Regulars had heard about the unjustly seized Bozic family villa for years and mostly shrugged it off. They accepted Mr. Bozic’s life as a series of dramatic anecdotes and even had a name for them: “Bob tales.”

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Mr. Bozic, next to a picture of his boxing match with Larry Holmes.CreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

But the story of the mansion in Belgrade, improbable as it seems, turns out to be true, like his other tales. Or at least most of them.

As he drank a bottle of red wine in his apartment in the Windsor Terrace section of Brooklyn in the first days of the year, Mr. Bozic acknowledged taking pleasure in recounting his life’s episodes. “I do look at it as a story,” he said, “a story being constantly written.”

The apartment, usually littered with paperbacks and back issues of National Geographic and Foreign Affairs, was being emptied as he moved belongings to a storage facility in Red Hook. A large photo of him battling Mr. Holmes still hung in the living room. (A picture of the fight hangs at Fanelli’s, too.)

“My whole life has been a series of chapters,” he continued. “Serbia is the next one. This will be the last definitive chapter of my life.”

“It’s not just a house,” he said. “The house is a symbol. This house has been hanging over my head since I was born.”

The effort to reclaim the house began a decade ago, when he waded into the byzantine process of Serbian property restitution. But its origins date to 1946, when Mr. Bozic’s family was forced to flee Yugoslavia.

He was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950, too late to have enjoyed his family’s prosperous life in Belgrade, complete with maids, nannies and a yacht. His father, Dobrivoje Bozic, was an influential engineer who invented an air-brake system for trains. The Bozic brake revolutionized train travel and made him wealthy. He bought a regal 22-room villa on Krunska Street in central Belgrade.

But after World War II, the Communist Party seized much of the country’s property, including the house on Krunska Street. Like other Serbian expatriates, the Bozics settled in Ontario.

The move changed everything. Days after Bob was born, his father abruptly left the family. Mr. Bozic speculates that his father wanted another daughter — several years earlier, Bob’s sister, Vesna, died when she was 5 from complications of appendicitis. Mr. Bozic met his father only once, when he was 5, at a family gathering. His mother, Radmila, became a cook at a hotel and lived there in a small room with Bob’s brother. She placed Bob in foster care.

“All the early misfortunes of Bob’s life stem from his childhood and the house in Belgrade,” said Mr. Bozic’s former wife, Alex McNear. “Going back to claim the house is a way for him to close his personal narrative.” (Ms. McNear, naturally, also holds a place in the Bob tales: When Mr. Obama was a student at Columbia University in 1982, she was his first serious girlfriend. She married Mr. Bozic five years later. They are divorced but remain close.)

Their 24-year-old daughter, Vesna, named after the sister Mr. Bozic never knew, shared her mother’s opinion.

“I think he never felt he belonged,” she said. “This is a way for him to connect with his family. I asked him, ‘Do you think there are ghosts in the house?’ He told me, ‘I hope so.’”

In Mr. Bozic’s telling, this unfortunate childhood becomes more of a mythical origin story.

When he was 11, a teacher falsely accused him of talking in class, and he attacked her afterward with a metal pipe. When a group of boys beat him up after school with rocks — Mr. Bozic pointed to the dents in his head as proof — he took retribution into his own hands. “I started taking them out in the bathroom,” he said. “One by one.”

He dropped out of high school and ran away from home when he was 15. He was living on the streets of Toronto and checking pay phones for change when a bookmaker named Bertie Mignacco took Mr. Bozic under his wing, enlisting him as an errand boy and, later, a debt collector. Mr. Mignacco also owned a boxing gym, and Mr. Bozic started training there. Mr. Bozic went on to win the Canadian national amateur heavyweight championship. It turned out he could fight.

Mr. Bozic’s battle with Holmes, a future heavyweight world champion, occurred at the Garden in 1973. Mr. Bozic’s nose was broken in the first round. Teeth flew out of his mouth in the third.

“I knew I was done after the Holmes fight,” Mr. Bozic said. “I knew he was better than I was ever going to be, and I was already starting to enter my next chapter.”

Mr. Holmes, now 66, still remembers Bob Bozic.

“I won damn near every round, I think, but it was a fight I will never forget,” he said when reached by phone. “I don’t know if he was a good boxer. He was a good fighter. There was no quit in him. He was all dog.”

From there, Mr. Bozic’s story begins to jump around. He worked as a bouncer at Studio 54, was the personal driver for a reporter covering the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the ’80s and drove in a convoy of trucks carrying “automobile parts and sewing machines” from Istanbul to Afghanistan.

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A photo of the Serbian mansion that once belonged to Mr. Bozic’s family, in front of his parents’ wedding picture..CreditNicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

The bank robbery was in 1980. Mr. Bozic told the managers of a Madison Avenue bank that accomplices outside were aiming guns at them. In fact, there were no weapons involved, and Mr. Bozic was arrested when the police arrived. Somehow he managed to avoid jail time.

Fanelli’s hired Mr. Bozic in 1990.

“Bob’s past 20 years in New York have probably been the most uneventful of his life,” said Madeleine Greey, a former girlfriend.

After he served his last beer at Fanelli’s, he was asked if he would miss New York. He didn’t think about it long.

“I’m good at closing chapters,” he said, continuing to wipe down the bar.

After Mr. Bozic arrived at Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade, he immediately checked into a hotel down the street from his family’s old house. He is killing time in the city as he waits for a final decision regarding his ownership of the place. He spends afternoons drinking wine and reading books in cafes.

The house, after being confiscated by the Communist Party, had a few illustrious owners. It was the Canadian Embassy, then the Iraqi Embassy. It later became the headquarters of Serbia’s Democratic Party. And now Serbia, hoping to join the European Union, has adopted guidelines for the restitution of seized property. After a promising development in September, Mr. Bozic felt confident enough to quit his job and book a flight.

The local media, amused by his tenacity, have written about his quest over the years. “They point at me on the streets,” Mr. Bozic said from Belgrade. “‘There’s that bartender from New York getting that huge house.’”

As for the fate of Fanelli’s, Mr. Bozic was not very concerned. “I think they’re looking for my replacement,” he said. “They want a forlorn soul who reads books and can make a drink.”

While waiting for the official decision, he has been exploring the house and imagining what went on in certain rooms or where his sister might have played.

“It’s me and the ghosts,” he said.

One detail about the house delighted him. He came upon one of his father’s train brakes. A previous tenant apparently thought it made a good doorstop.

“Can you believe that?” Mr. Bozic said. “It’s here, all these years later. This tiny brake that created this house and my legacy. Can you believe it?”